Editor's note: This is one of a series of stories from Ideation magazine on the various STEM-outreach
initiatives at William & Mary, programs that reach out beyond the
walls of campus to increase understanding and appreciation of the STEM
disciplines—science, technology, engineering and math. The full series
of stories is available here.

“Three, two,
one …”

A rocket
made out of a two-liter bottle shoots into the blue sky, a line of white smoke
trailing behind. The middle-school students that comprise the launch team shield
their eyes from the sun as they watch the bottle-rocket’s descent, estimating
the heights it reached and thinking of ways they can make it climb even higher.
Nearby, scientists and engineers—who have faced similar questions in their
careers, but with much larger equipment and real-life consequences—stand ready
to assist.

For the
students, the scientists are the ultimate study aid, providing both guidance
and a concrete example of what a career in science, technology, engineering or
math might look like. For the scientists, the students are prospective
colleagues and the possible future of their career fields.

The
collaboration between the professionals and students is thanks to a National Defense
Educational Program contract awarded to William & Mary’s STEM
Education Alliance. The
project pairs middle school teachers with professional engineers and scientists,
creating an opportunity for them to mentor both teachers and students.

“People
often wonder why a school of education is involved in STEM outreach activities.
Ultimately, it always begins with education,” said Gail Hardinge, executive
director of the STEM Education Alliance, or SEA. “We must expose students to
careers within an appropriate educational environment if we expect them to be
interested in becoming the engineers and scientists of the future.”

Since it
began in 2004 as the Virginia Demonstration Project, the SEA has worked with more than 19,000
students in eight school districts and more than 100 engineers from four naval
commands. Last summer, the alliance assisted in managing and evaluating four
summer academies attended by 300 students and approximately 75 teachers.

Hardinge,
who also is a clinical associate professor in William & Mary’s School of
Education, says that unlike many other STEM-outreach programs, the goals of the
alliance’s activities, which include hands-on projects like building rockets or
programming Lego robots, does not rest solely in content knowledge.

“Instead, the
STEM Education Alliance is about changing attitudes towards STEM and awareness
of STEM careers,” Hardinge said, adding that the alliance hopes to foster
positive attitudes about STEM topics in students.

“Research
has shown a connection between positive attitudes, self-efficacy and success,” said
Hardinge. However, she notes that the alliance doesn’t look at grades or Standards
of Learning (SOL) scores to evaluate their effectiveness in changing students’
attitudes. Instead, SEA participants look at student response to attitudinal surveys
on STEM careers and enrollment in upper-level STEM courses by SEA alumni.

Hardinge
noted that the alliance is currently involved in a longitudinal study, tracking
alumni of the program with the hopes of better understanding what happens to its
graduates once they are in college.

As for
awareness, the alliance hopes to increase students’ knowledge of STEM careers.
One of the things that Hardinge and her colleagues found when looking at
various STEM programs throughout the country is that few programs really
connect the dots for students between the activities they enjoy and the careers
that correspond to them.

“Kids go to STEM
summer academies and camps, and love the activities, but seldom does someone
say, ‘Hi, I’m so and so, and I am a scientist or engineer and this activity
you’re doing, I do in my real job,’” said Hardinge.

Therefore,
the alliance now includes a career component with their initial five strands of
STEM instruction that teachers and scientists focus on: inquiry based
instruction, co-teaching, carefully timed explicit instruction, cooperative
learning and thematic or “big idea” classroom instruction.

Teachers
involved in the alliance’s program are still teaching the content that they are
required to teach, including content required for the SOL tests, but the
alliance shows them how to “wrap it around a real world problem,” said
Hardinge.

“One of our
primary goals is to provide teachers with additional tools to teach. There are
interactive, engaging ways to increase a student’s content knowledge,” said
Hardinge, adding that the response by teachers has been overwhelmingly
positive.

“The feedback
that we received from teachers was, ‘I’m finally able to be the teacher I went
to school to be.” said Hardinge. “We were responding to a generation of
teachers who were saying, ‘I’m teaching to a test.’”

In 2010, the SEA received a sole-source contract
from the U.S. Department of Defense for a total of $2.5 million over three
years.

The contract is allowing the alliance to expand
its reach. SEA is now able to offer follow-up training to scientists, engineers
and teachers online. In the past, staff members had to travel to schools to
conduct follow-up training.

“We will provide a combination of face-to-face
and distance training,” said Hardinge. “Our goal is to broaden the reach beyond
the labs. For example, it’s very costly for us to conduct all follow-up
trainings, and the bigger we become, the more demand there is. So, what we’re
going to do is create blended learning opportunities by combining initial
face-to-face sessions with follow-up distance sessions. We’ll provide both synchronous and
asynchronous training.”

Jake Joseph, the project’s assistant director, will
be directing the alliance’s first pilot synchronous training this fall with the
Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in Charleston, S.C. The session
will be a follow-up to training the alliance conducted for the group in
Charleston in July 2011.

The contract is also allowing the alliance to
support a Hampton Roads Regional STEM Coalition, which will partner with local
teachers, engineers and scientists. In addition, the contract is funding an
expansion of the alliance’s use of the STEM Attitude and Awareness Scale, which
assesses students’ knowledge of and attitudes toward science, technology,
engineering and math.

“We’ve used our evaluation instrument in Virginia
on over 5,000 students,” said Joseph. “We are now contracted to evaluate
Charleston, South Carolina’s, STEM programs, as well as after-school STEM
programs in Philadelphia.”

Hardinge
said that one of the biggest challenges facing STEM education today is figuring
out how to maintain consistency through tough budget times. Programs stop and
start and valuable data is often lost.

“People are
constantly reinventing the wheel without an adequate evaluation system in
place. STEM projects often don’t build upon that which has already been evaluated,
failing to ask the important question, “How can we learn from what has already
been done in order to design a better program or an improved evaluation system?
Innovation is important, but it is also important to build upon that which has
already shown to have been successful.”